Samsung's NU8000 series of 4K HDR LED TVs offer a premium design, plenty of connected features, and a wide color range, but disappointing contrast.

Samsung has produced some very feature-rich, attractive LED TVs, but it continues to find itself sandwiched between less expensive options from manufacturers like TCL and Vizio, and superior OLED models from LG and Sony. The NU8000 series is near the top of Samsung's line, just a step below its QLED flagship TVs. At $1,199.99 for the 55-inch UN55NU8000FXZA we tested, it's a bit pricey, but still much more affordable than a comparably sized OLED screen, and it packs every connected and smart feature Samsung can fit into a stylish design. However, its picture quality is held back by a disappointingly high black level, leading to only middling contrast numbers. It's a viable choice if you're looking for a very big TV, though, with 75- and 82-inch models available when most manufacturers top out at 65 inches.

Editors' Note: This review has been updated to reflect corrected input lag measurements. The score has not been changed.

Design

The NU8000 looks strikingly minimalistic, with a remarkably thin LED panel sporting a very LG-like bezel-free design. The screen is framed by a quarter-inch black border around the panel, and a brushed gunmetal-colored band around the sides and top. A 0.4-inch-wide silver-colored strip runs along the bottom of the screen, under which the angular, T-shaped black-and-gunmetal-colored stand supports the TV.

Besides the power cable, which plugs into the back of the left side, all ports sit facing right on a recess on the right side of the TV. The NU8000 features four HDMI ports, two USB ports, an Ethernet port, an antenna/cable connection, an optical audio output, and a 3.5mm connector for RS232 systems. No legacy analog video inputs can be found, which will present a problem if you have an older DVD player, VCR, or video game system.

The remote is a slim, simple black wand with a prominent circular direction pad flanked by menu buttons. The power button and a pinhole microphone sit at the top, and volume and channel rockers sit below the home button, and that's it for physical controls. The remote doesn't have any mouse-like pointer controls, like the touchpads of some older Samsung smart TVs or the air mouse function of LG's Magic Remote. On the bright side, it's completely wireless thanks to a Bluetooth connection to the TV, so you don't need to point it directly at the screen to use it.

Smart Features

The NU8000 continues Samsung's trend of using its own smart TV platform for connected features, rather than a standardized third-party platform like Android TV or Roku TV. Fortunately, Samsung's smart TV interface is very full-featured, with a solid selection of apps and streaming services and a robust amount of built-in functions. That includes two live TV guides for both broadcast and streaming TV. The standard Live TV guide shows you what's on broadcast TV, while TV Plus shows a variety of streaming internet television channels through PlutoTV, like Nerdist and The Onion. You don't need to register or subscribe to anything to access PlutoTV channels or broadcast TV (though you need an antenna plugged into the back of the screen).

On the app front, Samsung's smart TV platform offers most big names, including Amazon, Google Play Movies & TV, HBO Go/Now, Hulu, Netflix, Sling TV, Twitch, and YouTube. There are also plenty of music options, including Amazon Music, Deezer, iHeartRadio, Pandora, SiriusXM, Spotify, and TuneIn (Google Play Music is notably missing). You can also find the usual complement of information, lifestyle, and sports channels and services, and even a large number of games thanks to the built-in Steam Link support and the inclusion of GameFly Streaming (which, like all live game streaming services, requires a very fast internet connection, in addition to a compatible Bluetooth controller paired with the TV).

It's a generous selection of services with few big missing items (though Crunchyroll, PlayStation Vue, and PlayStation Now are nowhere to be found). It isn't as robust a library as Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, or Roku TV, with their extensive niche and regional apps and streaming services, but for a first-party platform it's comprehensive. A web browser is also available on the NU8000, but without the mouse-like controls of a touchpad or air mouse, moving the on-screen cursor feels clunky.

Samsung's 2018 smart TV platform also includes the company's Bixby voice assistant. By holding down the microphone button on the remote and speaking into the pinhole mic on top, you can ask Bixby to change the channel or source, adjust the volume, load apps, control smart home devices compatible with Samsung's SmartThings platform, and get useful information like weather reports.

Bixby is a handy feature that would have distinguished Samsung's smart TVs as particularly advanced two years ago. However, with Android TV and Amazon Fire TV already incorporating Google Assistant and Alexa respectively, and with the Fire TV and Apple TV media hubs letting users put Alexa and Siri on any TV, Samsung's first-party voice assistant isn't a particularly new or unique aspect to the NU8000. It also has some clunky Samsung-centric aspects that make it feel a bit more limited than Alexa or Google Assistant if you don't have an all-Samsung home with Galaxy phones and SmartThings devices.

Performance

The ultra HD (UHD, or 4K) NU8000 supports high dynamic range (HDR) video, and can handle standard HDR10 and hybrid log gamma (HLG) content. It does not support Dolby Vision HDR, but it can play dynamic metadata-based HDR encoded under Samsung's own HDR10+ standard.

We test TVs using a Klein K-10A colorimeter, a Murideo SIX-G signal generator, and SpectraCal's CalMAN software on a Razer Blade Pro laptop. In HDR+ mode with minimal settings altered, the NU8000 shows a peak brightness of 554.41cd/m2 on a 100-percent luminance full field. This is quite bright, but that brightness is slightly undercut by the TV's mediocre black level of 0.09cd/m2 measured with a white box on the screen. This results in a decent but not particularly impressive 6,160:1 contrast ratio. For comparison, the much less expensive TCL 6-Series shows a much higher contrast ratio of 49,715:1 thanks to its deeper 0.01cd/m2 black level, despite having a slightly dimmer 497.15cd/m2 peak brightness.

The above chart shows Rec.709 broadcast standard colors as boxes and measured color levels as dots. The NU8000 can reach well past broadcast standards, producing a wider range of greens and reds when displaying HDR content. Whites and grays are accurate, but cyans and magentas tend to drive a bit further towards green and red, respectively, than ideal.

The BBC's Planet Earth II on Ultra HD Blu-ray looks vivid and crisp on the NU8000 in its HDR+ picture mode. The greens and blues of the water and plant life in the "Islands" episodes look rich and natural, and the fine details of sloth fur and tree bark come through clearly both in bright, direct sunlight and in shade. Despite the less-than-impressive contrast numbers we measured in our tests, Planet Earth II displays a nice spread of very bright highlights and reasonably dark shadows, keeping shady parts of the scene from appearing washed out.

The red of the titular character's costume in Deadpool looks deep and vivid, and flesh tones appear generally natural, if slightly cool in overcast outdoor scenes. The burning lab fight shows fairly dark shadows against the bright reds and oranges of the fire, if the contrast isn't quite as wide as on some other TVs, keeping the flames from really visually roaring.

The Great Gatsby shows the limits of the NU8000's contrast. While the bright panel can make white suits and well-lit faces stand out in the high-contrast party scenes, shadow details like the contours and textures of black suits become muddy. Very dark objects simply don't get much definition.

Input Lag and Power Consumption

Input lag is the amount of time between when a TV receives a signal and the display updates. In a normal movie-viewing mode like HDR+, the NU8000 shows a very high input lag of 75.8ms. Enabling Game Mode, which makes some compromises on picture quality, cuts that down to a much more reasonable 28.7ms, which can be trimmed down further to an excellent 16ms if you disable motion processing in that mode. This qualifies the NU8000 as one of our best TVs for gaming, reaching well below the 20ms threshold.

Under normal viewing conditions, the NU8000 consumes 109 watts in HDR+ mode with no power-saving features enabled. Setting the Power Saving mode to low dims the screen noticeably while keeping it very watchable, and cuts down the consumption to 69 watts. Setting the mode to medium shaves power use to 53 watts, and the high Power Saving mode dims the screen too much to be comfortably viewable.

Conclusions

Samsung's NU8000 TVs pack a stylish design with plenty of connected features and a very bright panel, but lag behind in terms of contrast performance due to mediocre black levels. The 55-inch model we tested is generally a strong TV when considered on its own, but its $1,100 price tag looks pretty unappealing next to TCL's Roku TV-powered 6-Series, which offers a 65-inch model for $100 less and a 55-inch model for $650, with far superior contrast and similar color performance. The TCL is a superior choice if you're looking for a more budget-friendly option, and if you're willing to spend more, last year's excellent 55-inch LG C7P OLED TV can be found for around $1,700.

Read More

About the Author

Will Greenwald has been covering consumer technology for a decade, and has served on the editorial staffs of CNET.com, Sound & Vision, and Maximum PC. His work and analysis has been seen in GamePro, Tested.com, Geek.com, and several other publications. He currently covers consumer electronics in the PC Labs as the in-house home entertainment expert... See Full Bio

Samsung UN55NU8000FXZA

Samsung UN55NU8000FXZA

Get Our Best Stories!

This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.